Life expectancy improved by more than 30 years in the US during the 20th Century. Advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease have played a role, but the real reason we’re living longer today has a lot more to do with public health interventions than advances in health care. Interventions like vaccines, motor vehicle safety, safer workplaces, clean water and food safety, tobacco control and improvements in maternal and child health are responsible for most of the improvement. You can see the top 10 public health interventions of the 20th century in an article I wrote awhile ago in the old Prevention Bulletin.
If you want to be part of the movement that pushes public health improvements into the 21st century, you’re in luck. Arizona has one of the most dynamic and flexible School of Public Health in the country.
For starters, there’s the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health is the first nationally accredited college of public health in the Southwest. They offer a dynamic academic curriculum that includes the undergraduate degree in public health and graduate degrees in public health, epidemiology, biostatistics, and environmental health sciences. They’ve gained national and international recognition for research productivity and integration into communities across Arizona, the Southwest, Mexico and the globe. The faculty, alumni and students are consistently finding new approaches to chronic disease prevention, community public health preparedness, family wellness and advocacy for public health policy.
There’s also a new Phoenix-Collaborative MPH in Public Health Practice program as well as a distance learning Graduate Certificate in Public Health; which are great options for folks looking to advance their knowledge about public health. The Master of Public Health in Public Health Practice is a new interdisciplinary program that prepares students to develop the public health skills needed to work in a variety of governmental and non-governmental settings including the local, county and state departments of health, Medicaid and Medicare programs, hospitals, and community health centers.
They also have 3 certificate programs that are completely on-line. These are graduate level programs where students get accepted to our graduate college and take 15 units. The programs include:
Graduate Certificate in Public Health which includes 5 core MPH courses;
Graduate Certificate in Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology;
Graduate Certificate in Global Health; and
Clinical Research Training Program (This isn’t all online yet but they’re making progress).
Interested? Spend some time on the links above, and remember, public health is full of old-timers like me whose careers are long in the tooth and who are poaching great jobs. But a lot of us will be out of the way in the next few years, and public health needs a new generation work-force to move us into the 21st century.
